[thelist] Re: x-cart vs zen-cart

[Maximillian Schwanekamp]

sbeam wrote:
> Actually it 
> really hurt us as it took much longer to customize than planned - when 
> we heard it used Smarty we assumed adjusting the templates would be a 
> cakewalk...
> ...
> Anyway, those headaches aside, it does have some nice features out of 
> the box that set it apart from other offering that I know of. We have 
> spent many hours customizing it to suit the clients needs and it is 
> better written than osCommerce at least. Personally I might try 
> LiteCommerce next time, ...

Good points.  I was just trying to emphasize the importance of getting a
grasp of what it takes to customize an installation of one of the large
commerce suites.  X-Cart comes with templates that are poorly-designed
by today's standards, and perhaps abuses Smarty's capabilities.  But at
least you could consult the Smarty documentation and find out what the
Smarty tags mean, and have something to go on.  For some other ecommerce
systems' template engines, those docs will not be there, which *could*
make cleaning up the template markup even more difficult.  I'm not
advocating for any particular cart system, just the practice of going in
eyes-open.

-- 
Max Schwanekamp
http://www.neptunewebworks.com/